Saturday, June 24, 2006

I am much bemused by the sudden interest in the secret, hypersonic US spy plane, the Aurora. See, for example, here. I came across stories about the Aurora while writing my book Aliens: Why They Are Here. From below this craft looks triangular, as do the Stealth fighter and bomber. During secret testing, the Stealths were seen and interpreted by some as alien craft - after all, they looked nothing like any known earthbound plane. The same seems to have happened with the Aurora, though most spotters and amateur investigators just insisted it was, indeed, yet another secret American plane. At first, I assumed this was one more fragment of paranoid mythology. Subsequently, however, two startling and entirely unexpected conversations provided confirmation that the Aurora does, in fact, exist. One was with a source very close to the US military who just talked about the plane as he would an F-15 or a 747: the other was with somebody who had experience of USAF instructions to airfields in the south west to turn off their radar at certain times of the day. They didn't want anybody tracking their hypersonic baby. I could tell you who these guys were, but then I'd have to kill you and I've got too much on at the moment. All of which makes this latest Aurora coverage rather odd. I had assumed everybody knew what I knew. Apparently not. So, dear readers of Thought Experiments: The Blog, now, at least, you know. Perhaps best to keep it under your hat, these are dangerous times.

1 comment:

My wife's uncle flew 9and crashed) in the Fleet Air Arm. 'flying it around willy-nilly' (from your Grauniad article) is not a term he recognises. Things have obviously changed since the last (real) war.

A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.